GameIdeas.org

First of all, sorry for the lack of update yesterday. I had a job interview and was otherwise pretty busy, and what’s more the site was down for a while.

Anyway, let’s jump directly to today’s subject:

Variety

There was concern in the comments that this game could become repetitive. Indeed, wine making isn’t renowned as a thrilling activity full of surprise and excitement. But that doesn’t mean the game can’t be varied.

There are 2 dimensions to variety in games: breadth and depth. Breadth is variety by the sheer number of elements. For example, Diablo has a lot of breadth because there are many different items and monsters in the game — you never know what you’ll get. Depth is variety through the richness of the gameplay. Chess doesn’t have much breadth (just a few pieces and a board that always stay the same) but it’s a very deep game. Every game is different because the layout of the pieces evolves differently each time.

In the case of Pocket Vineyard, it would be hard to find enough different things to add a lot of breadth. Depth, on the other hand, is quite possible if the rules of the game are interesting and subtle enough. That’s why I decided to try to add more depth to the gameplay.

Will Wright, creator of Sim City and The Sims, is the best at creating these open-ended simulations. Studying how he does his stuff is a great way to learn how to make a more interesting vineyard simulation.

In Sim City, there’s a large number of factors that influence the city: amount of residences and other types of buildings, amount of roads, pollution, and so on. Every action the player makes influences multiple factors at the same time. Raising taxes increases the money you have but makes people unhappy, building more roads reduces traffic congestion but increases pollution and so on. The interaction of all these factors and actions makes it challenging to find the best course of action, and that’s where the fun lies.

Sim Vineyard

Using that approach, we should have a large number of factors that affect the quality of the wine and actions that change multiple factors simultaneously. Luckily for the game, making high quality wine is a complex activity that requires subtle balance.

Here’s a bunch of factors that could be taken in consideration by the game. Each must be balanced: too much is just as bad as too little and different types of wines have different needs.

• Sugar-level in the grapes
• Yeast amount
• Amount of grapes produced
• Purity
• Acidity
• Quantity of tannins
• Moisture
• Grape ripeness
• and so on…

If this were the full design for the game, I’d make sure to learn enough about wine-making to know which factors are important and which can be ignored. I’m not expert enough on the subject to make these decisions in this blog, but you get the idea of what kind of factors should be considered.

Your actions as a player affect those variables each day. Cutting half the leaves of each plant could increase the amount of sun grapes get directly (and hence sugar), but could reduce moisture. Using artificial fertilizer can help grow more grapes faster, but reduces the purity of the fruit. All actions have that kind of complex impact, so each day you must decide which actions will help you reach your goals.

What’s more, you’re limited to a few actions each day. Your vineyard has a limited number of people working on it, so you can’t do everything every time. You have to decide how to best spend your time each time you start the game.

You also have to take random events into account. The most obvious is the weather. While you’ll get short term forecast and long term trends, you can’t be sure how much sun or rain you’ll get. Sickness and troublesome insects can also cause problems and force you to readjust your plans. It’s this randomness that adds the most variety: every day conditions change so you can never be sure of what will happen.

That’s it for Today

I think that explains better what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis in this game. With a deep enough simulation and random variations, we ensure the situation always evolves and requires interesting decisions by the player. Studying the art and science behind wine making would be necessary to balance realism, fun and approachability however.

I still need to define more clearly how to control the game. I now have a pretty good idea of what you do while playing the game, but I’m not really sure yet how to actually do those actions. That’s what I’ll figure out tomorrow.

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